To each his own Cinema (part 1)
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
We’ve to admit the fact that life runs parallel to a misty unknown which has been quest of many great individuals who have tried time and again to unravel its mysteries.
Why do people fall in love? What is love and how it became a reason for wars? Who is God and why has there been so much bloodshed in His name? Why we are here on this planet and what makes us decide as to which path we are going to tread? What is that force which puts a gun in someone’s hand and makes him take a life of an unknown whom he couldn’t have possibly known? Are all my reasons as good as they sound in my head or there is some loophole? What drives a person to bitch about someone who was once a very close friend? What are those forces which make us wake up every morning and make us work in a place we hate or want to like?
There are like zillions of these questions and every single one of them has another zillion explanations or hypothesis I may say. There are three ways to go about unraveling these mysteries. One, you completely ignore them. Two, you think about them once or twice but never dive in that dreadful ocean. Third, you make it the purpose of your living.
Cinema at its best is everything that you can ever imagine or want from life. Since I’ve started exploring this field, rather than merely using it for entertainment purpose, I’ve realized that though it doesn’t answers those crucial questions in life which forms the sum-total of our purpose here, it brings you close to them.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s is that cinema.
Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch)
The first time I tried to saw it I was so high on grass I slept in the middle.
The second time I saw it two days later, my entire structure echoed with a wild outburst of transcendence, my insides went almost completely
numb.
Should I keep sending her those little pieces cut out straight from my heart in the form of words, sometimes mine, sometimes someone else’s which if I wrote would be exactly like the ones written, even if she doesn’t gets any of it or is far from it or not as far as I think, colliding somewhere in between her fragility and my vulnerability.
There were many questions quite alike this one which hit me when I saw this movie.
The movie is in layers. Though they are just three in number, there is no scale on which you can measure their manifestation on your own life.
This movie explores love in three major domains.
For Octavio, love is all about overcoming every possible obstacle to run away with Susana (his brother’s wife) including the vulnerability of Susana upon leaving her abusive husband high and dry (“you still don’t get it?”)
This one tells you how people can go to any length when they are smitten in case of Octavio and even the world is not enough. Love making in cinema couldn’t get any better as it was with Octavio and Susana against the background score of ……..
(A giant’s joust turns the air into natural gas
A wild duel warns me
How close I’m of going into an outrageous world
I feel my fragility…)
For Daniel, love is about breaking free from his wife and kids to live with his dog-obsessed model girlfriend, Valeria. People argue that it’s the dark side of human nature; I say it’s just a PoV. Why is evil less important than good? (That’s a different story though)
I think there is a fine line which allows you to walk out from a marriage. This segment is about the measure of that line. Is love for another woman (who wants to tear up an entire floor to get her dog out) a good enough reason? Maybe.
At one stage I felt like getting inside the movie and take Richie (her dog) pronounced as “Reechiee” out of that hole. Daniel is finally able to take him out and you feel more for the dog than him when he is finally out.
For El Chivo, an ex- gorilla and a current contract killer, who left his wife and daughter to go and change the world, love was when he loved them (his family), which he now tries to find in a dozen stray dogs who serve as his companion.
The scene where he walks in his apartment to find that Octavio’s dog (which he rescued from the street) has killed all his dogs, is heart wrenching. (I had to pause the movie and have a cigarette to continue after that scene).
This one is all about “when you have it don’t let it go”….even the world is not worth it.
Even if the confession scene where he says it all to his daughter is in Spanish, you don’t need subtitles to understand his emotions.
This movie was actually supposed to be 11 stories but after 36 drafts Guillermo Ariga (its writer) and Gonzalez decided it to be only three. Thank God. I don’t think I could’ve taken anymore with me.
There are two great performances by Gael Garcia Bernel as Octavio and Echevarria as El Chivo.
I saw Bernel in Motorcycle Diaries first and after watching him in that movie I didn’t like Benicio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara in Che 1 and 2.
He essays the impulse driven young Octavio like some primitive history character. A great talent to look out for in the future.
The music used in the movie is as good as you would have heard anywhere.
The camera here is again very close to the subjects whether they are dogs or humans.
The final scenes of all the stories are about man’s anxiety towards the unknown and his never say die spirit.
Tags: Amores Perros, Gael Garcia Bernal, Guillermo Ariga
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
This is one of the best movies of the decade…a film that realized ‘Hyperlink’ film making at its best…
Please be more careful and thorough when you review these….
For the starters..know your details.. for example,
1. What is ‘Ex-Gorilla’???, it is guerilla, derived from la guerre…which means war, and guerilla means ‘a small scale battle’
2. There is no one called ‘Bernel’, Bernal…
This review is really dissappointing…not one of the stories have been covered in detail…No character has been analyzed…
Lucha de gigantes…
Mi Corazon…
and the soundtrack, perhaps the best ensemble of latino music, itself needs a whole lot of respect than the translation section…
From Amerros Perros to Babel (21 gram being the weakest of the bests, imo) …….something was created that can never be repeated.
And the last shot of Amerros Peros, after watching that one, I no longer have any sorrow if I had to die tomorrow.
How can someone think of movie like this ?
“To each his own cinema” ..i though you were reviewing Lar von Trier’s title.
@ram: ki fark painda hai yaaron (main aapko chand dikha raha hun aap ungli dekh rahe ho)!!waise, i didn’t intend to review the movie, its too hot and my hands are too young!! sorry for the spelling errors…itna tedha tedha naam hai ki jitna bhi check karo,gadbadi ho jaati hai!!ab alajendro ko pronounce kaise kariyega, take a guess…alahandro,in mexico J is pronounced as H!!
@sourav: he’s just one of the filmmakers!!there are 36 in all who have each directed a short film as to how they view cinema!!its a very fascinating list actually(that of filmmakers)!!
Oh..now that makes sense..:)